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Powerful Blast Confuses Astronomers
eldavojohn writes "Astronomers are still speculating as to what could have caused an abnormally strong five millisecond burst to be detected six years ago when it completely saturated their recording equipment. From the article: 'The burst was so bright that at the time it was first recorded it was dismissed as man-made radio interference. It put out a huge amount of power (10exp33 Joules), equivalent to a large (2000MW) power station running for two billion billion years.'"
The above poster is correct. If you hear a burst of static on the radio, you might just as easily suspect the radio has a loose wire as you would suspect a distant source of interference.
However, if you pick up Beethoven's 5th Symphony, the odds of it being the loose wire making and breaking contact in exactly the right pattern are incredibly low...to the point you'd be insane if your top theory wasn't a distant transmitter broadcasting the symphony.
That's a little extreme of an analogy, but in this case there is also an order to the noise that highly suggests a real signal. Of course, there's orderly forms of interference, too, but most of those can be eliminated by comparing them with the signal.
I don't understand the comment on the rate. If they've only observed one, they can't make any guesses about the rate. The fact that we saw one looking at only a small portion of the sky suggests the rate is reasonably high, but we don't know how much dumb chance was involved.
As for what it is, it sounds like they may have ruled out this idea, but I was wondering if it might actually be a much more distant gamma-ray burst that's been red-shifted all the way to radio wavelengths.